Helpshift Ropes In Former Salesforce Veteran Linda Crawford As CEO

Customer support platform Helpshift has appointed Linda Crawford, Salesforce veteran executive as the new Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the company. Crawford will take the helm immediately, while founder and current CEO Abinash Tripathy will become Helpshift’s Chief Strategy Officer.

In her new role, Crawford aims to help drive the company’s next stage of growth, leveraging her experience to rapidly scale the company to fulfill the need for the next generation of customer support.

Speaking on her role, Linda said, “I couldn’t be more excited to join Helpshift as the CEO. Joining Helpshift was an easy decision. Helpshift is solving something big, something disruptive: meeting customers wherever they are and providing instantaneous conversational help.”

Adding further she said, “I can’t believe that I’ve been in the CRM business since 1996. As I look back over those twenty plus years, I’m proud of our industry for making improvements in customer service for business to business. But, what about us as consumers??? I don’t know about you, but I dread calling, emailing or chatting with the vendors when I’m the consumer. For the first time, we have the technology platform, the data and the software to make sure no customer feels like a case number when they need help.”

Helpshift looked at servicing consumers from their point of view. Consumer first. That means mobile – in an app or mobile web. It means massive scalability to collect valuable data to provide proactive and personalized support. Knowing that consumers don’t want to call or email or chat meant a messaging-first approach.

Helpshift is off to a great start, with over 600 million users being supported with their technology every month. “We are just at the beginning of our journey. My plan is to help Helpshift grow like the business I oversaw for Salesforce: Sales Cloud Products. As the Executive Vice President & Cloud CEO of that division grew the business from $1B to $2B in three years. We grew the customer base to 150,000+ customers and 2,500,000+ users,” said Crawford.

Founded in 2010 by Abinash Tripathy and Baishampayan Ghose, Helpshift is based out of Pune. The platform helps companies to engage their customers with their apps through targeted push campaigns, and proactively avoid any in-app frustration through native FAQs and In-App Messaging.

The genius of Helpshift comes from incredible team, Abinash Tripathy, Helpshift’s co-founder and now Chief Strategy Officer, Baishampayan Ghose co-founder and CTO, Tushar Makhija VP of Sales & Success and Pradeep Jindal VP of Engineering. Together they will drive Helpshift’s next stage of growth to change customer service forever.

Cisco Investments Joins Helpshift's $23M Series B Round of Funding

Helpshift, the company revolutionizing the customer support industry through enterprise-level, in-app customer experiences, has announced that Cisco Investments has recently joined their Series B funding round, which follows previous investors such as Intel Capital, Microsoft Ventures and Salesforce Ventures. As one of Cisco Investments’ portfolio companies, Helpshift and Cisco will also explore opportunities to integrate Helpshift’s in-app customer support solutions with Cisco’s leading contact center solutions.

As the world rapidly moves to adopt in-app support for business to consumer communication, Helpshift’s Series B round continues to enable the company to take autonomous customer support to the next level. Additionally, as mobile replaces the web as the primary channel through which customers engage, the $350 Billion contact center industry is expected to take advantage of this new channel.

“Apps have become the primary way in which consumers and employees in the enterprise are accessing products and services,” said Abinash Tripathy, CEO and Co-Founder of Helpshift. “Just like customer service moved away from phone (voice) to email in the era of the Web, we are now seeing a transition where customer service is moving inside apps to eliminate all the friction in the process of supporting users.  With the additional funding from Cisco Investments, we are looking to help the entire contact center industry transition from being reactive to proactive while driving higher customer satisfaction and lowering cost.”

In the smartphone era, customers are using mobile apps to interact with products and services. By bringing customer service in-app, Helpshift has eliminated the frustration of customers having to leave the app to get support. The company provides a seamless messaging experience to enable customers to talk to companies like they would talk to their friends.

“We continue to invest in strategic solutions to help propel technology developments that will solve challenges for our customers, partners, and beyond,” said Rob Salvagno, head of Cisco Investments and vice president of Cisco Corporate Development. “Through our investment, we look forward to supporting Helpshift to enable companies to provide best in-class mobile customer care through their data-centric messaging platform.”

Helpshift Secures $23M in Series B Funding to Bring In-App Customer Support to the Masses

Helpshift, the company revolutionizing the customer support experience on mobile devices, today announced it closed a $23 Million Series B with participation from new investors, Microsoft Ventures, Salesforce Ventures and all previously existing investors, including Intel Capital, Nexus Venture Partners, True Ventures and Visionnaire Ventures—bringing the company’s total capital raised to $36.2 Million.

“Our continued growth is a direct reflection of a capital-intensive support industry that’s ready for change. Consumers are tired of waiting for support agents to get back to them, and companies are tired of staffing expensive support teams to answer common, or even predictable, problems in the first place. People want immediate help, wherever they are, especially when using mobile applications,” said Abinash Tripathy, CEO and co-founder of Helpshift. “This is the year we champion a new model of support, one that’s better for both consumers, as well as the companies serving them.”

Since its inception in 2012, Helpshift has continually pushed the market forward, being the first to offer a fully native mobile support experience. The company has since expanded its offering, making it easy to help customers on whatever platform they happen to be on, in their exact moment of need.

Some of the customers benefiting from radically improved customer experience and agent efficiency across their teams thanks to Helpshift include: Zynga, VirginMedia, Microsoft, WesternUnion, Flipboard, Shyp, Luxe, WordPress and thousands of other industry leading brands, startups, and developers.

“Helpshift has been a great partner for Microsoft and our investment today represents our confidence in their messaging-based approach to customer service, as we hold a shared value of providing the seamless experience customers want,” said Nagraj Kashyap, corporate vice president, Microsoft Ventures.

“Businesses everywhere are moving away from email and embracing intuitive in-app support as the future. The tech industry saw this just one month back when Uber announced they had rolled out an easy to use in-app customer support model to deliver what they called ‘service at the push of a button.’ At Helpshift, we saw this years ago. We’ll continue to see many more companies make the change towards better, faster, in-app customer support.  Our new financing will help fuel our continued expansion across teams in R&D, sales and marketing.  We’re humbled by the confidence our investors, customers, and industry influencers have in us to build on this strong momentum,” continued Tripathy.